New Mexico Environmental News

The Air Law Payoff

Major federal regulations are giving back more dollars in benefits than they cost, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air regulations account for the biggest share of those benefits, concludes a 2003 review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

In reviewing EPA cost-benefit figures for 107 federal regulations issued between 1 October 1992 and 30 September 2002, OIRA found that benefits ranged from $146 billion to $230 billion, compared to costs of $36-42 billion. The lion's share of benefits came from four clean air regulations that showed benefits of $101-119 billion compared to costs of $8-8.8 billion.

"Reducing public exposure to fine particles promises both public health and economic benefits," says OIRA administrator John Graham. "These rules will be costly to industry and consumers, but science suggests that the benefits, though somewhat uncertain, justify the costs."

But Ben Lieberman, director of air quality policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank, says, "It's pretty clear that EPA is exaggerating." He claims the evidence to support the EPA's calculations is weak, resulting in overblown estimates of the cost of lives saved.

Levy counters that the EPA used reasonable methods to come up with its figures. The methods are based on how much people are willing to pay to reduce their risk of dying in a year and how much workers are paid to take on jobs where there is some risk of death, he says. He acknowledges that coming up with such figures is controversial. "It is difficult to come up with a value, and there is clearly uncertainty surrounding that value," he says. (The EPA did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)

Lieberman also argues that the epidemiologic evidence supporting the benefits of rules regulating particulate matter is weak. Indeed, the OMB report does note that the EPA analysis assumes that all particles are equally damaging, even though there are chemical differences between particle types emitted from power plants and motor vehicles.

While acknowledging that it's plausible that some fine particles may be more damaging than others, James Hammitt, director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, also notes that "very little is known about which [particles] are harmful and which are not," but that as far as scientists can tell, they are all harmful at some level.

By Harvey Black, EHPnet

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